“The New York Times, I think, really is the gold standard of a certain type of journalism,” said The Huffington Post’s editor-in-chief Lydia Polgreen in an interview with her BuzzFeed counterpart Ben Smith. “And in some ways, it’s the most important type of journalism. This chronicle of the biggest and most important stories of our time covered with a level of rigor and seriousness that is really unparalleled.”
An alumnus of The New York Times (NYT), Polgreen spoke of the power and importance of emotion in amplifying narratives pushed by the news media. Huffington Post, she suggested, would move toward becoming a populist tabloid:
“The great tabloids were always driven by a sense of outrage, you know a sense of righteous indignation about hypocrisy, about corruption, about the foibles of the super-rich, and had this sensibility of, ‘There are people out there that are trying to screw you, and we’re going expose them for it.’ The tabloid is fundamentally an emotional form of journalism.”
Tabloids as “fundamentally a working person’s newspaper,” said Polgreen, suggesting that contemporary news media outlets such as the NYT has become disconnected from what she viewed as ordinary Americans. The tabloid’s ideal type, she continued, “[is a] news organization that thinks of its mission as to speak directly to people who are sort of the foundation of the American work force.”
Most news media, said Polgreen, was clustered in the ideological center.
Polgreen suggested that the outcome of 2016’s presidential election was a function of factually incorrect and emotionally-charged narratives pushed by news media outlets sympathetic to Donald Trump/Republicans and opposed to Hillary Clinton/Democrats:
“You cannot gave journalism without facts and truth. But if facts and truth were what actually sort of moved people’s lives and moved their decision-making, like, the election would’ve had a different outcome, right?”
Last year’s presidential election, said Polgreen, was an inflection point for her professional sense of purpose. She saw her news media role as providing an opportunity to correct what she viewed as the electoral error of Donald Trump’s defeat of Hillary Clinton:
“I think the real sort of decision moment for me was election night, and just realizing that there was something happening in the country and the world that had a very deep relationship to the nature of the current media landscape. And that this opportunity that was in front of me could be a place to try and work on that, to try and fix what was going wrong.”
Many news media figures, added Polgreen, viewed their professional post-election obligations as she did; as vehicles to correct what they saw as an electoral error.
News media outlets must harness emotion in their presentation of narratives, said Polgreen. “You need to reckon with emotion,” she said. “You have to deal with how people feel, otherwise you miss the story.”
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